A Horror With No Name
by beb
Summary: Danny is troubled by weird dreams, dreams of a girl trapped in the Ghost Zone, dreams of a unimaginable horror that threatens Earth itself. How can he fight something he isn't even sure is real?
1. Chapter 1

We all have had that dream: where we are being chased through a dark and cluttered forest by some nameless horror. We run as fast as we can, gasping for air like a fish out of water and knowing that we dare not pause to look behind to see what follows for fear they will catch us. For Danny Fenton that dream was more common that for others. When you're a half ghost the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night are always coming after you.

But this dream was different. It seemed more real. Details were oddly specific. The air stank of compost and stagnant water. The trees gave off a cinnamony scent as his crashed through their branches. From time to time a puff of brimstone warned him that the nameless horror was getting closer, requiring him to put on a fresh burst of speed.

Suddenly a ravine opened up in front of him, he tumbled down with painful bumps and jolts. He sprang to his feet as soon as he stopped rolling and tore down the bottom of the ravine. After a time it seemed like the pall of dread behind him was receding. Had the monster gone in the other direction? He hoped so. His strength was gone. He had to find a place to hide and rest.

Ahead he saw a thicket of some kind growing up around a large stone that had rolled out of the bank of the ravine. The space behind the stone formed a sort of cave. He crawled under the brambles and around the rock. There was just enough space for him to curl up.

He sat there scrunched up for several minutes trying to breath softly, silently. The miasma of terror, of evil, that had driven him ahead of that thing seemed to have drifted away. It would be back. Or perhaps not. He couldn't tell. He squirmed around in his hidey-hole trying to get more comfortable. He brushed twigs out of his long hair, rubbed mud off his short white pants. He reached up under his shirt and pulled the sweaty bra that was rasping on his already irritated breast down...

Bra?

Danny woke with a start.

He ran his hands over his chest to be sure. No boobs, no bra. Just his normal skinny self. "What was that all about?" he wondered.

The dream remained vividly in his mind. He replayed it over and over. The chase, the nameless dread. The oddly vivid details. The touching of breasts that he did not have.

He picked up his cell phone.

"Do you ever dream about being a boy?" he asked when Sam answered.

"Do you have any idea what time it is," she demanded.

"No. Seriously, do you ever have dreams about being a boy?"

"No, Never. Good night!"

"Sam, wait, don't hang up! I had this really weird dream where I had breasts!"

"Danny. You're fourteen and a boy. Thinking about boobs is normal."

"I was dreaming I was a girl."

"I'm glad you're finally getting in touch with your feminine side. Now, good night!" and she snapped her phone shut.

***

Danny lay in bed for a long time trying to figure out what the dream meant, if it meant anything at all. Part of what Sam had said was true, he had dreamed about making out with girls, but he had never dreamed of being a girl. That was something entirely different...and creepy. At some point in the long hours of the night he fell asleep and woke with a start when his alarm clock sounded.

School didn't go any better. He was groggy from lack of sleep and musing about the dream and got bawled out by Mr. Lancer when Danny not only didn't know the answer to a question his teacher put to him, but didn't even realize that Mr. Lancer had asked him a question. This lead to a long speech about how not applying himself to his school work would ruin the rest of his life and an hour's detention after school. The detention came because Danny started mouthing the all too familiar speech. Mr. Lancer did not like being mocked.

At lunch Danny was so distracted that Sam and Tucker had already finished most of their meals before Danny made it through the line. Tucker was sneaking some baby carrots from Sam's vegetarian salad plate when Danny sat down and drenched the meatloaf on his plate with catsup. He forked a few bites into his mouth before Sam asked, "Did you tell Tucker about your dream?"

"No, he didn't." Tucker replied. "What dream was this?"

Danny shoveled more food into his mouth so he wouldn't have to answer.

"He dreamed he was a girl so he could feel himself up!"

"I did not!" Danny shouted, or tried to with a mouth full of meatloaf.

"Dude, that is messed up!" Tucker laughed.

"That's not what happened!"Danny sputtered. "I dreamed I was being chased by something."

"That part sounds natural enough," Tucker said. "Who was it- - Skulker? Vlad? The Fright Knight?"

"I don't know. That was odd in itself. I thought I knew every frightening thing in the Ghost Zone."

"Maybe you weren't dreaming you were in the Ghost Zone?" Sam suggested.

"It seemed like I was but during the dream I didn't know where I was. I found a place to hide, and after whatever it was went away settled down to take a nap. That's then I dreamed something was itching on my chest. I went to fix it - - and it was a bra. And that's when I woke up."

"That's your weird dream?" Tucker scoffed. "You woke up before anything happened. Now if I were dreaming about T'Keisha I wouldn't wake up until we..."

"Too Much Personal Information, Tuck." Sam interrupted. "I do not want to know what you dream about!"

"Sam, you a girl," Danny began,

"Thanks for noticing."

"Do you have problems with your bra when you get all hot and sweaty?"

"I" she emphasized, "do not get 'all hot and sweaty.' Goths do not sweat.!"

"Right!"

"Still you make an interesting point," Sam continued. "Some girls, wearing poorly fitted brassieres can experience skin irritation during prolonged physical activity. A detail I can't imagine you knowing."

"So you believe my dream is real?"

"Danny, you had a nightmare, We all do. So what? big deal!"

***

But that night it was the same dream, only different.

He was being chased through a dark and formless jungle. Something was panting close on his heels. He pushed through some large, leafy brushes and suddenly ran out into the air. He fell with a sickening lurch, which was weird because Danny could fly and wasn't afraid of height because of it. He caught a brief glimpse of an endless sky filled with millions of floating islands, some large, some small. Some with trees and rivers and waterfalls as the rivers ran off the edge of the islands. He closed his eyes tight to drive out that insane, illogical, impossible sights. (But that's just the way the Ghost Zone, Danny thought to himself in his dream. Why am I frightened by something so normal?)

As he fell he could feel long hair whipping about his face. Then came a loud scream, like the opening of a rusty gate, only louder, and longer, "r-r-r-r-r-r-ck" and slithey tentacles wrapped themselves about his body.

Danny opened his eyes and looked up. A thing like a frog the size of a minivan with bat-wings and tentacles instead of limbs had swooped out of the sky and seized him. Danny screamed in terror, a high pitched girly scream such as had never come out of his mouth. The monster replied with another cry like the creak of a rusty gate.

It was carrying him - her? - back to its master, the nameless horror that had been chasing him - her? - for the last several days. Going back was not an option. His or her hands flailed about until they touched a stick that had been shoved under his (or her?) belt. It was a bit over a yard long. Danny pulled the stick out and began whacking the beast with it. The beast screamed in protest and tried to grab the stick out of his - her - hands but it's tentacles were too clumsy. Suddenly Danny made a lucky struck, cracking the beast firmly on the side of its head.

There was a loud "snap" and the head seemed to cave in on itself. The beast's tentacles went limp and Danny fell out of its grasp. Danny - or whoever's dream he was in - breathed a sigh of relief, then sucked in his or her breath in fear of what would happen next.

'Next' was a flurry of whacking tree branches through which Danny smashed. They rained a hundred bruising blows on him, slowed his fall so that when he hit solid land it was only mildly stunning. He staggered to his feet, brushing off the branches that continued to rain down on him - or her. Vaguely he noticed that his legs were bare, his shoes were white tennies with a pink stripes. His socks were white with lacy tops. His eyes swung around the clearing he was in, searching for cover. He saw a fallen tree, a giant, three or four feet in diameter off in the distance, brush grew thickly around its upraised stump. Danny pushed his way through the thicket until he found a small hollow deep within. He slumped against the fallen tree, brushed long, tangled hair out of his eyes (?) and broke down into uncontrollable crying.

With a gasp, Danny sat up in bed.

There were no tears in his eyes. No brambles, oozing scratches on his arms and legs, no log or floating islands.

Danny looked around his bedroom. Street lights coming in through his window made the room shadowy. It was comfortably familiar: the outlines of posters on the wall, the jumble of dirty clothes on the floor. Danny found that he was breathing heavily, his heart was pounding.

He grabbed for his cell phone, flipped it open and was on the verge of pressing Sam's name on the speed dial when he stopped. What was he going to tell her: that he had a dream where he'd cried like a little girl? She'd love being awaken in the middle of the night to hear that! He put the phone back down and laid back on his pillow and sighed. What was going on? Why was he having these dreams? Were they even dreams? It was like he was seeing things that were happening to someone else. But who?

Danny tried to get back to sleep but couldn't. After an hour of restless tossing and turning, he got up and went downstairs and turned on the TV. He flipped through the channels somewhat mechanically, looking for something interesting. At some point sleep must have overtaken him because he was back in the thicket on the floating island. He was cold and shivering, sitting with his arms wrapped around his bare knees. The knees were skinned and covered in dirt and clotted blood. Clutched in his hands was a photograph. He was staring intently at the photo and whispering. For some reason Danny couldn't make out who was in the picture. He wanted to look around the thicket, see what was there. Maybe something would give him a clue to what was going on, but his eyes wouldn't leave the faceless photo. Although the sense of reality was intense Danny couldn't not make himself do anything. It was like he was a remote observer, a rider, disconnected from his own dream. He tried again to make out the image in the photograph but the dreamer was focusing through the picture, staring off into infinity.

A sense of panic swept over him, of helplessness, desperation. If only....

"Danny!"

He was back in the living room, cold sweat running down his back.

"What are you doing out here?" his mother asked. She had coming down in her bathrobe to start breakfast.

Danny didn't answer for a moment, confused because the voice calling out his name hadn't been his mother. The dreamer had been calling his name. And with another start, Danny realized that it was he in the picture the dreamer had been starting at! Why would he dream about himself?

"Danny?" There was a note of concern in his mother's voice.

"Had a bad dream, Mom. Couldn't get back to sleep."

"About what?" she asked.

"Being chased by some nameless horror."

"We all have those, sweetie. It's a school day, though. You'd better get ready. Don't want to be late for class." She turned to go to the kitchen.

"Say, Mom." A thought had come to him.

"What, Danny?"

"Have you and Dad ever studied telepathy? Telepathic ommunications with the Ghost Zone?"

"You mean like mediums, seances, Ouija boards and the like?"

"Yeah," Danny agreed, not wanted to introduce his dreams into the discussion just yet.

"Yes, we did, but the problem with any kind of study like this is setting up a control. How can you prove that what the people are saying they have heard from the Ghost Zone really comes from there. Since no one has ever been to the Ghost Zone there's no way of knowing."

Danny never understood why his parents thought their Ghost Zone Portal didn't work when so obviously it did.

"So could one receive telepathy from the Ghost Zone?"

"There have been some very intriguing cases; we could never validate any of them."

Maddie Fenton was always the sensible one in the family. She would never commit to something she couldn't absolutely prove. This was about as close to a 'yes' as she would give,. Danny wanted to ask some more questions but his mother told him to get dressed.

At school that day Danny tried to avoid Sam and Tucker while he thought about the dreams he had had. But they caught up with him at lunch.

"Have any more strange dreams?" Sam asked as she slid into a seat across from him.

Danny sighed and recounted his dream.

"You cried like a little girl!" Tucker chortled just like Danny expected him to.

"The nameless horrors sound like something out of Lovecraft," Sam said. At Danny's blank stare, she explained. "H. P. Lovecraft. Wrote a lot of horror stories in the 30s about creatures of monstrous forms from alien dimensions."

"I'm sure these are visions from someone trapped in the Ghost Zone," Danny insisted.

"Who?" Sam asked.

"I don't know."

"Why you?" Tucker asked.

Danny shrugged. That was another question haunting Danny. He suspected it maybe was because of his half-ghost nature. Strange things always happened to him, whether he wanted it to or not.

Danny found himself unable to concentrate in class after lunch. The question of who was trapped and being hunted in the Ghost Zone kept going around and around in his mind. When the bell sounded ending the class Danny got up and walked out of the room, walked down the hall and straight through the doors. He kept on walking until he came to a nearby park. He sat on a bench there and thought.

He was convinced now that someone - someone he knew - was lost in the Ghost Zone but how did they get in there? There were only two working Ghost Zone Portals as far as he knew. His parent's and Vlad Masters' No one could get through his parents' portal without triggering an alarm – aside from Sam, Turner, Jazz, and himself. And all of them were accounted for. It was hard to tell what his worst enemy - Vlad Masters - was up to, but it wasn't like him to throw mortals into the Ghost Zone. So how else could anyone have gotten onto the other dimension?

Of course it could be a trick to get him to enter the Ghost Zone. He had a lot of enemies there. Actually, pretty much all the inhabitants of the Ghost Zone qualified as enemies. But not all of them would think of such an elaborate ruse, if ruse this was.

Skulker, the greatest of ghost hunters, immediately came to mind. He long had wanted to nail Danny's hide to his lodge's wall. Literally, alongside all the other skins of ghostly beasts he had hunted down and killed. He was a clever and remorseless hunter. He was heartless enough to steal a mortal and use them as bait to snare Danny. But the flying monster that Danny had seen in his second dream was unlike any he had ever seen in the Ghost Zone.

That could imply Desiree, the ghost genie. She could make monsters of any form out of nothingness. And, again, could snatch a mortal into the ghost zone. But this seemed too subtle for her. Not that Desiree wasn't above making indirect, complicated plots. It just wasn't part of her nature.

Ember McLain was cunning but tended towards music related plots. Penelope Spectra, who lived off the depressions of others was more likely to kidnap someone and torment them the way his dreams seemed to imply. Walker, the ghost warden, wouldn't use monsters to chase escapees from his prison.

In all, it did not seem likely that this was a plot by any of his known enemies to lure him into the Ghost Zone. That much was a relief because it was obvious that Danny would have to enter the Ghost Zone to rescue them.

But who?

It had to be someone who had a picture of him. That sort of eliminated the person Danny would most like to rescue - Paulina, the prettiest cheerleader at Casper High. Danny, like most boys at Casper High had a crush on her, not that she ever had time for a mere freshman. She couldn't be the person in his dream because she had never accepted any of Danny's school pictures. Besides the girl in his dreams - it had been a relief to Danny to realize that the person in his dreams was not him - had a very pale skin. Paulina was Latina, with a Latin's brown skin. For that matter, it ruled out both T'Keisha and Valerie Grey, who were Black.

While Danny wasn't what you would call a popular kid, he was gregarious. He knew most of the kids in his school. There were a lot of girls he knew – vaguely ay least – who fit the image of the girl in his dream, but Danny had a pretty good idea who it was. It was a girl he had met over the summer at Camp Sleepy Hollow. A red-head with long hair, and very pale skin that showed off her many freckles - Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde.

She was the daughter of a Guy in White, the government's official ghost fighting organization. She desperately wanted to be a Guy in White when she grew up, something her father was opposed to. Her father was a real Marionet; did not want her doing anything adventurous. Which, not unlike Sam Manson, only made her want to do dangerous, risky things. That didn't explain how she got into the Ghost Zone but if there was anyone who could get into ghost-related trouble, if would be her.

At the same time she would have to be in really serious trouble before she would think of calling on Danny for help. Danny Fenton, that is. She didn't know that Danny was the ghost, Danny Phantom. This had made things difficult at Camp because she had come to go ghost hunting and Danny had to go to great lengths to make sure that the ghost she found wasn't him!

After camp Danny had called her a couple times to have her dig up information from her father's Guys in White computer. While Danny had been desperate at the time for the information, this had only encouraged Abigail to continue her ghost-hunting. And convinced that Danny was ghost-hunting on the side, she was always trying to insert herself into his plans. Danny had mixed feeling about the girl. She could be very pleasant but other times bossy and demanding.

Danny had worked hard not to encourage her, so he couldn't imagine why she would think that staring at his picture would send a message to him.

Of course, it didn't have to be Abigail.

There was one way to find out.

Danny pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts till he found Abigail's name. He hit 'send' and waited.

There was no sound of dialing. He looked at the display and saw "No connection."

She could be out of range of any tower, only she lived in the Washington, DC area. It was hard to imagine any place there out of range of a tower. She could have shut down her phone for school but looking at his watch and adjusting for time zones, he figured she had to be out of school by now. Or she could be no place on Earth...

At home, on his desk somewhere, were papers she'd given him from the Guys in White computer files. One of them had Abigail's father's phone number. Her father would certainly know where Abigail was. Danny looked at his watch again. It was too early to show up at home. He looked around. No one was in sight. He went ghost, turned invisible and flew off to his home at Fentonworks.

Danny stayed invisible as he searched his desk. He moved papers as quietly as possible. In accordance to Murphy Law, the last paper he looked at was the one with the phone number. He typed the number into his phone but flew out of the house to a quiet location before pressing 'send.'

The call was picked up on the first ring.

"This is a private number." a gruff voice said. "How did you get it?"

"I'm - ah - a friend. I'm - ah -calling about - ah - your daughter...." Danny stumbled, unnerved by the anger in the other's voice.

"What do you know about my daughter?"

"Is she home?"

"I think you know better than I?"

"Abigail safety is very important to me." Danny said.

"What do you want for her return?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't play cute with me, Daniel Fenton. I know who you are. I know where you're calling from. If you think you can get money from me you are sadly mistaken. You don't screw with the federal government. Give up now. Tell me where my daughter is. It will go better for you."

"Are you nuts? I didn't do anything to you daughter. I'm trying to find her."

"The F.B.I. is closing in on you at this very minute. You can't hope to get away with this!"

"I - -" Danny snapped his phone shut, then recalling how the F.B.I. had been able to track people by their cell phone even when turned off, he turned the phone over and dug out the batteries. He stuffed the separate parts into his pocket. He looked over the edge of the rooftop he had been standing on expecting to see F.B.I. cars closing in on their house. He didn't see any. Had Abigail's father lied about that? Then again he knew who he was. Caller ID! Danny rolled his eyes. How could he have not thought about that before making the call? Gack, what an amateur. Mr. Farley-Hyde-Smythe hardly needed to send agents scurrying after him; they need only camp out at his house and wait for him to come home.

What was he to do?

He reached for his cell phone to call Sam and Tucker, then stopped. They might be already listening in to his conversations. Besides what could she suggest? Either to run or to surrender.

Running would be a sign of guilt, but if he surrendered it would be days, perhaps weeks, before they stopped questioning him, and all that time Abigail would be stuck in the Ghost Zone waiting to be rescued. He could hardly tell the F.B.I. about his dreams, or about traveling to the Ghost Zone and least of all about being a ghost. The simple fact was that he had to get into the Ghost Zone was quickly as possible and bring Abigail back out.

Danny turned ghost and flew back to his bedroom. He wanted to leave a note to someone in case things did not go well in the Ghost Zone. It couldn't be Sam or Tucker because he didn't want to get them involved. Or worse, have them insist on going with him. He could hardly tell his parents since they neither knew that Danny was a ghost or that anyone could travel into the Ghost Zone. He'd have to tell Jazz, but Jazz wouldn't never let him go, she was too responsible that way. Ah! Maybe she wasn't home yet!

Danny grabbed a pen and tore a page out of one of his notebooks. "Gone to Ghost Zone" he wrote, left it unsigned and phased through walls into her room. He tucked the note into a corner of the writing pad on her desk. She wouldn't find it for a couple days, he guessed. If everything went well, he'd be back and could retrieve the note before she ever saw it.

That done, Danny dropped through the floors into the basement labs where his parents had built their portal. He slapped the DNA-based security-lock, opening the steel shutters that usually covered the swirling vortex of ecto-plasm leading from the mortal dimension to the dimensions of ghosts, spirits and things that go bump in the night. It took several seconds for the shutters to fully open and another few seconds to close. Time enough for a ghost to slip through the portal. Danny hit the 'close' button then dived into the void,


	2. Chapter 2

The first time Danny went into the Ghost Zone was when he had been turned into a ghost. He had been standing in the middle of the tunnel when the switch had been turned on. The pain of the transition had been excruciating. It felt like he was being ripped apart atom by atom and rebuilt again - which is pretty much what he figured had happened. The forces tearing a hole in space-time had torn him apart, his individual molecules had been coated with ectoplasm and the ectoplasm had pulled him back together, bringing about the birth of Danny Phantom!

Going through the Portal now only caused a brief, weird twisting sensation, like he'd been caught on the Tilt-a-whirl for a second. When the haze of the portal energies faded away Danny was in an endless realm filled with floating doors. Each door, he knew, lead to a different pocket universe. One even lead back to Earth, not that Danny had ever been able to find it.

To the left the sky of floating doors gradually turned onto floating islands. To the right the floating doors gradually turned first into floating funhouse mirrors, then into windows that looked upon strange dimensions that hurt Danny's head when looked through. Beyond that the windows faded into smears of color just hovered there in space. Reds and yellows, green, purple, tangerine and others that he couldn't name and wasn't sure were colors to be found on Earth. Danny had gone as far as the realm of colors once during his explorations of the Ghost Zone, but had found the place so disturbing that he had turned back and never gone there again.

Danny turned in the direction that lead to the realm of floating islands.

He had, at one time, attempted to map the Ghost Zone but every time he returned things had subtly changed. The realm of floating islands was always off to this side but individual islands might be to the left or right of some central landmark. Or the landmark might be gone entirely, only to return later. There was no gravity in the realm of floating islands except on the islands themselves. The islands always floated same side up. It was as if the island believed in gravity even if no one else did. The idea that the islands were alive or at least believed in things was absolutely crazy. Except that this was the Ghost Zone. Crazy here was normal. What was ectoplasm but thoughts; ghosts but the thoughts of dead people. Why couldn't the Ghost Zone be a place that existed because it thought it existed. Didn't some philosopher on Earth say something like "I think therefore I am?" Danny had come to realize that the only way to deal with the Ghost was, like dealing with adults, was to accept it as it was without trying to understand any of it.

On one of the lower, larger islands was a large building made of logs, stones, with thatch on the roof and the skulls of strange beasts with large, surreal horns and savage tusks. Danny pulled up before the island trying to still his pounding heart. One of his worst enemies lives down there: Skulker the ghost hunter. He had long vowed to nail Danny's hide to his lodge's wall. Danny preferred keeping his hide where it was. Skulker was the sort of ghost who would plan intricate schemes to lure him to the Ghost Zone, where it would be easier to capture him. She was in there, Danny was sure. And he would have to go in to get her.....

Danny hesitated, then realized that the longer he hesitated the more scared he was of busting into Skulker's lair. He realized that if he didn't do this and do it now, he never would. With a gulp of air and grimace and fear, Danny hurled himself toward's the hunting lodge.

He blew open the doors with a blast of ectoplasmic fire and swooped into the large open room at the front of the building.

"Where is she?" he shouted into the echoing room. And as the echoes died away, he realized that no one was there.

The room filled most of the building had a long aisle down the length with tables and benches on either side. Skins of strange beasts were hung on the wall, as well as mounted heads of beasts odd assortments of eyes, horns, fangs and mouths. At the far end, on a low dais was a throne like chair facing the empty hall. A large firepit separated it from the rest of the hall. A table on wheels was pushed next to the throne and a setting of dishes laid out on it. A crumpled napkin on the plate suggested that a meal had just passed.

Danny's lungs were heaving and his stomach threatened to as well.

"Skulker!" he shouted. "Come out!"

Then Danny spotted a doorway off to one side, partially covered by a tapestry. He flew through the opening and into a smaller room filled with various devices, machining tool, shelves and tables. It looked not unlike his parent's lab back in the mortal world. It reminded Danny that Skulker was an inventor as well as hunter. Most of the elaborate gear he used on his expeditions were of his own making.

In fact, next to a central table stood Skulker now -- minus his head. That sat on the table, it's faceplate open. A small chair was inside - empty!

Seeing the bulky physique of his enemy had made Danny's heart leap up his throat for a second, until he'd seen the missing head. Danny was one of the few who knew Skulker's secret.

"What's going on?" a squeaky voice demanded on the corner of the room. There was a door there, opening into what appeared to be some sort of bathroom. Steam was floating to the ceiling while on the floor a small creature looking like a head with tiny feet was waddling towards the body of Skulker.

Danny threw himself on the ambulating head. Seizing it in his two hands he gave it a rough shaking and demanded, "Where is she?"

"Unhand me, mortal!" the creature cried in its tiny voice. "You will rue the day you laid hand on the mighty Skulker!"

The secret, which only Danny and a few others knew, was that what they thought was the well-toned and powerful Skulker was a bionic device, a robot operated by a weak and tiny creature, the one he held in his hands now.

"Don't play games with me, Skulker," Danny shouted into its tiny ears. "I know you got her and I want her released -- unharmed -- now!"

"What do you mean? I don't have anyone, child!" Skulker squeaked.

"The red-head: Abigail Farley Smithe-Hyde. The girl you stole from the mortal realm." As he shouted Danny squeeze tighter and tighter. Skulker was beginning to change color by the time Danny had stopped talking.

"Can't breathe!" the little creature wheezed. "I don't know who you mean. I haven't kidnaped anyone from the mortal realm."

Danny looked at Skulker in disbelieve. "This isn't some elaborate scheme to lure me into the Ghost Zone?"

"No!" Skulker gasped.

"This can't be right," Danny muttered, dropping Skulker to the floor. "If you didn't take her, who did?"

The tiny creature made a dash for the table. A ladder built into one leg lead up from the floor. It was reaching for the first rung when Danny fired an energy bolt, singing its fingers. "uh uh uh!" he chided, then grabbed the ghost up again.

"If you didn't kidnap her, who did?"

"How would I know?"

"You know everything that goes on in the Ghost Zone. That's what makes you the great hunter that you are."

The ghost swelled a bit at the praise, "Knowledge is power" as one of your Earth philosophers once said. "But my spies have revealed none making a foray to Earth, let along of a kidnaping...."

"Someone has her. I want her back," Danny shouted desperately, squeezing the creature again in his anger.

"Wait! Wait!" Skulker gasped. "There have been reports of an Abductor wandering out from the blackest depths of the Ghost Zone. All fear the Abductors and avoid them so knowledge of their movements is spotty. But they have been know to steal humans from the mortal realm to torment for their pleasure."

"Does this 'Abductor' look like a giant frog with bat wings?" Danny asked.

"No. But that sounds like one of their hounds. No one is sure what an abductor looks like since none have escaped from their clutches."

"Where is this 'Abductor'?" Danny demanded.

"Far away, east and up of here, near the vale of hanging doors."

"Where, precisely!"

"Directions are meaningless in the Ghost Zone, you know that," Skulker gasped around Danny's tightening fingers.

"You can do better than that!"

"OK, I have a tracking device on my suit. It's keyed to mortals. Once you get within a few miles of her it will guide you the rest of the way." The creature pointed to a small oblong device mounted on the left hand sleeve of his bionic armor. Danny pulled it out of its socket and looked at it more closely. Controls were few and obvious. It pointed, as Skulker had said, to the east and up.

"OK," Danny said. "Thanks." He started walking out of the room, carrying the little creature with him.

"Hey," it squeaked. "Where are you taking me? Let me go. You got what you need."

"I'll let you go, just not too close to that suit of yours." He tossed Skulker onto the throne chair, levitated into the air and streaked through the broken doors. He wasn't sure that Skulker wouldn't give chase but figured that by the time he got back to his body and mounted in it, Danny would have more than enough of a head start.

***

Hours later Danny floated down to the floating island indicated by the tracking device. He could make out the large clearing in the middle that had appeared in his dreams. He was a little surprised that Skulker had not tricked him with the device and more than a little thankful that this whole nightmare would soon be over. He walked softly towards the fallen tree he knew Abigail had been hiding in. He called out softly, "Abigail?"

***

The next thing he knew, Danny was laying on the ground, looking up into a swirling mass of tree limbs. He squeezed his eyes tightly closed in hopes to stemming the rising nausea. His head hurt like a million brain-freezes compressed into one. A groan escaped as he tried to move his leaden arms.

"Oh, my God, are you all right!" a girl shouted, or seemed to, into his ear. Rough hands jerked him up causing nova level pain to explode through his head. The overhead tree branches swirled harshly almost causing him to vomit. A ratty mat of red-hair fell over his face, an odor of B.O. and halitosis sweep over him.

"Abby?"

"Thank god, you're all right!" she choked. For once failing to correct him on the correct form of her name. "I have never been so glad to see a ghost in all my life! Is Danny Fenton with you?"

Danny, squeezed his eyes shout for a moment, opened them and tried to make a swift glance down his body. He seemed to be seeing double, but at least each image of his body was dressed in a black jumpsuit. He hadn't chance from Danny Phantom to Danny Fenton in front of her. "No it's easier for me to enter the Ghost Zone alone." he said.

"Sorry I hit you. I thought you were that thing that's been chasing me. Here, let me get you some water." She dropped his head with a thud into the ground. Danny groaned in pain and slowly leveraged himself into a sitting position. Florence Nightingale she wasn't; more like Calamity Jane.

Abigail was back in a moment with a handful of green leaves dripping water. She pressed them to his face, and that felt real good.

Danny felt the back of his head and discovered a large sticky swelling there. It actually felt the size of an egg. He always thought when people said they had a goose egg on their head it was poetic license or something. While waiting for his head to stop throbbing he asked, "What happened? How did you get here?"

"What is this place?" she asked in return.

"The Ghost Zone." Danny grunted.

"Really?" Abigail looked around. "It really exists? Is it all like this?"

"It gets weirder elsewhere. How--"

"It must have been a week ago, though it seems like forever. It was Take Your Daughter To Work Day and I had talked The Lump into taking me with him to the Guys in White headquarters. He doesn't want me to have anything to do with the GIW but I whined and pleaded until he gave in. Turns out, for a special agent, he spends a awful lot of time filling in forms, writing reports, _proofreading_ reports, and reading reports from other agents. I was getting bored so I asked if I could go to the commissary to grab a bite. Actually I was going to sneak off to the research labs to see what they had going on there.

"There was no one in the lab when I got there. I knew it was their lunch hours since I had researched their work schedule before going in. They had a lot of neat stuff there. I would've loved to ask what they all did but I'd never have gotten in if anyone had been there.

"I saw one strange machine in a room by itself. It was about the size of a desk, had a lot of old vacuum tubes sticking out of it, knobs, dials. It looked like some kind of old ham radio. There was even a microphone and headphones hooked to the front and a goofy, lop-sided circular antenna on top.

"Sounds like Beaucoup Buck's Ghost Zone Radio," Danny whispered.

"Really! But I thought you blew that up?"

"I did. Maybe he had another one stored away somewhere. Or maybe the Guys in White were trying to reconstruct it. But it's not a Portal, I don't see how you could have gotten here through that? You didn't stick your head into the antenna and accidentally turn the machine on?"

Abigail was struck for a moment by the oddly specific question the Phantom ghost had asked, then dismissed it as she went on with her story. "I put on the headphones and listened for a moment but didn't hear anything. So I bent over the microphone and called out "Hello?" a couple times. The machine was on because the vacuum tubes were glowing. Nothing happened so I took off the headphones and bent over the antenna -- but I did not touch anything. I know better than to do that, thank you very much!"

Danny didn't feel like correcting her that by putting on the headphones and speaking into the microphone she had 'touched' the Ghost Zone Radio for all practical purposes.

"...That's when these weird tentacles erupted out of the center of the antenna, grabbed me and pulled into this freakish place. I broke free of whatever it was that had yanked me through and ran like hell. It would follow me for a while, go away and come back later. I ran off the end of one of these crazy islands and fell to this one. It sends those ugly flying frogs after me but so far they haven't been able to find me." She stopped and looked at Danny for a moment. "So how did you find me so easily?"

Danny had been feeling the back of his head. The knot there had started to subside. As a ghost he had incredible recuperative powers. A blow like that in his human phase would have laid him up for days. "Let's get out of here first. I'll fill you in on my end of this while we're flying back to the portal."

"You can't just _poof_ me back to Earth?"

"If only."

Danny stood up and walked around a bit to check out how well he felt.

"Do you remember which island you fell off of? We've got to go back there. There must be a rip in the continuum. I think I can push you through the portal, even if it's not a normal portal."

"Can't we go back the way you came in. I don't want to go anywhere near that thing that dragged me through.

"Skulker said it was an 'Abductor' and it's something even other ghosts are afraid of. It would be easier to take you back to the portal I used but harder to explain why you showed up there and not where you disappeared. I - uh - Fenton has enough troubles already without that."

"Like what?"

"You father thinks I - he kidnaped you."

"What?"

"Danny Fenton called your father's cell phone when you weren't answering yours."

"Danny called my dad? Oh, man that was a mistake!"

"Yes, we know that -- now!"

"And my dad is investigating my disappearance?"

"Yeah!"

"I didn't know he cared."

"He's your father!"

"He never acts like it."

"Well, he's involved. He's got the FBI investigating the Fentons. If you show up anywhere near them he'll never believe that they had nothing to do with this."

"I'll tell him that they weren't involved."

"He wouldn't listen to you. Does he listen to you now?"

"I'll make him listen."

Danny shook his head. And was amazed to find that he didn't experience the blinding pain of just a few minutes before when he did it.

"But if I show up in the Guys in White's headquarter after all this times what will I tell them?"

"Be radical. Try telling them the truth"

"I am not a liar."

Danny looked at her disbelievingly, then started wandering around the large clearing where she had first fallen from the sky. Looking up he could make out the maze of broken branches where she had plummeted through. Most had sprung back in place since so it was hard for him to gauge just where she had hit or at what angle she had come through the canopy.

"Looking the way you look," he explained, "your story of being seized by some kind of tentacled monster and dragged into the Ghost Zone for a week would be very believable.

"What do you mean by that?" Abigail demanded. Danny ignored her.

"Is this where you landed?" he asked. "We can only hope that by backtracking your fall we can find the island you first fell off of. Just take my hand and I'll be able to fly you out of here."

But the instant their hands touched Danny's vision flickered and suddenly he was looking at himself through shorter eyes. With a gasp they let go at the same instant, jumping back.

As soon as their hands lost contact Danny's vision returned. He looked puzzled for a second, then motioned Abigail to come close and briefly touched her hand. Again his vision switched to her perspective. He closed his eyes but his vision didn't stop. Instead he could clearly see himself closing his eyes. He let go of her hand again and scowled.

"I take it this is not something that usually happens with ghosts," Abigail asked.

"No," Danny muttered, deep in thought. This would explain why he had been having those weird dreams. He wasn't dreaming, but seeing through her eyes. Telepathy, just as he had thought. But why was it happening now? He'd touched her in the past, hand-shakes, brushing past each other when they had been in Chicago on that ghost hunting expedition, and nothing had happened then. Was it because she was now in the ghost zone, a mortal among ghosts just as he was half ghost and half-mortal?

"I - that is - Fenton said he'd been having strange dreams, that's why he thought you might be in trouble. This must be what he was talking about."

"I was trying to contact him. Staring at this picture I have of him. Hoping that he could read my mind."

"Ever dream you were seeing things through his eyes?"

"Like just now, between us? Kinda - maybe - I don't know."

There was something weird going on and Danny needed to find out what. He'd planned to carry Abigail back to where she first came through but as long as their vision swapped like that, it would be hard, perhaps impossible to do. Something had to be causing this telepathy. It had never happened to him before so something had to be different. Something had to be the cause of this.

Danny looked at the girl closely then started walking around her. She turned with him. "Hold still for a moment," he told her.

Danny wasn't sure what he was looking for. What he saw as a slender girl of medium height, bright red, somewhat kinky hair, now matted into an unspeakable mess, white t-shirt, stained with multiple layers of dirt, ripped in a couple places, snagged in dozens more, white shorts with rolled up cuffs equally stained and abused, sneakers that were more brown than white with anklet socks with only a few shreds of lacy remaining. Her arms and legs were scratched all over the place. Her face, set in a unpleasant, demanding moue, was hollow and even more faded than usual. Wait! Under her hair there was something, a bump on her shoulder that wasn't natural.

Danny reached over and pulled back Abigail's hair. He poked the small swelling at the base of her neck.

"What is it?" Abigail demanded, unable to see what he was looking at.

Danny jumped back with a gasp when the lump suddenly opened and an eye stared back at him. Abigail craned her neck around enough to finally see what it was and screamed. She clutched at her shoulder and tore the lump off, throwing it to the ground, where it continued to blink and glare at them before starting to wiggle away. Danny fired a long, hot blast of ecto-plasm at it until there was nothing left by a deep charred hole in the ground. Then he turned and caught Abigail as she started to faint. As he held her up, Danny realized that this time there was no mysterious exchange to visions.

"My god, that thing was living on me! -- all this time! I think I'm going to hurl," but Abigail didn't. After a moment she was strong enough to stand on her own.

"What was that?" Danny asked.

"It looked like one of the eyes on the creature that has been hounding me."

"The flying frog?"

"No, the other thing. I only saw it once briefly. It looked like a giant hairball, all tentacles and eyes . And the eyes were on the tentacles! Just looking at it gave me the shivers. I think it radiates some kind of terror field because I could tell when it was near and when it left by the amount of dread I was feeling."

She looked at the burned hole were Danny had incinerated it and abruptly buried her head against his shoulder. "Oh, God," she said between sniffles, "I thought I had lost that thing, but all along it knew exactly where I was. That eye was spying for it. It was just stringing me along to make me even more scared."

"Not any more it won't." Danny said confidently.

"But with it's eye gone, the beast will come looking for us itself!" Abigail pushed herself back and looked Danny in the face. "You don't want to meet it. Believe me, you do not want to meet it!"

"Then let's get out of here," Danny said, reaching for her hand. Abigail ran off instead, crossing the clearing to where Danny had regained consciousness. She picked up a thick stick that was lying there and shoved it through her belt.

"Little slugger," she explained when she had returned. "I don't feel safe without it." It was a tree branch about three feet long and a couple inches thick, with a lump on one end. Was that blood spotting the lump? Was it his? Involuntarily his hand went to the back of his head. The lump there was all but gone. "Really," he said. "Just try not to brain any more friends." Danny took her hand and levitating her with him into the air and through the breaks in the canopy where she'd fallen a week before.

***

Danny tried guess which of the floating islands overhead Abigail had fallen from. From their angle of ascent through the broken branches it seemed like only one island was large enough for her to have run as far as she did and still fall to this island. It was a longs ways off. Danny built up speed until the wind was whipping through their hair. He told the red-haired girl some of what happen been happening since she had disappeared. It was hard to retell events so that it sounded like someone else had told them to him first but Danny was determined to keep his secret from the girl. While Abigail seemed both happy and trusting to see Danny Phantom, the ghost boy, he wasn't sure how long she would continue to feel that way about if once they got back to the mortal realm.

She talked, too, about how she had survived the week in the ghost zone, mostly finding water in small puddles and otherwise starving. Danny mentioned she seemed relatively unfazed by getting transported into another dimension and being attacked by strange and apparently quite horrible monsters but Abigail seemed to just laugh it off. It was something _exciting_! An _adventure_! But mentioning the eye that had glued itself to her shoulder sent deep shivers through her body. Danny wondered if she weren't in some sort of denial now and only later come to see how frightening and dangerous this all had been.

They were near the island they thought Abigail had first come through when a scream like a rusty gate opening sounded behind them. Danny spun around and saw a green monster closing in on them. He recognized the frog-like body and bat wings of the monster that had chased Abigail once before. He dodged to one side, awkwardly with Abigail extended on one hand. As the horror passed a long, red tongue flicked out and struck Danny across the shoulders. A terrific charge of electricity surged through his body. For a moment his concentration faltered and he and Abigail plummeted back the way they came. The girl's scream brought Danny back to consciousness. He checked their fall then looked around for the giant frog-thing. It was flapping its way towards them.

"You didn't mention it's electric tongue!" Danny accused.

"It never used it the other time," she shouted back, "How was I to know!"

Danny fired a blast of energy at it but his attack bounced off its hide. "Oh, Man!" he groaned. "It's fire-proof, too!" Danny dodged again and fired another blast of energy. It, too, bounced off the monster's hide but seemed to irritate it slightly since it veered away out of range.

As the monster turned back towards them Danny pulled Abigail close and told her to climb on to his back. This freed up both his hands and placed her weight closer to his.

The bat-frog flicked his tongue at Danny again. He threw up a barrier that kept it from shocking him. A stream of ecto-plasm along its side drove it off but didn't appear to damage it.

"Doesn't this thing have any weaknesses?" He cursed.

Abigail's hot, noxious breath blew over his ear. "It's got a weak skull," she shouted. "Get me close and I'll bash it's rotten brains out!" She fumbled to pull the stick from her belt.

Why not, Danny thought, and rolled around and gave chase to the beast.

It wasn't expecting to be chased.

Danny was soaring past its head before the frog-monster realized it was being attacked.

Abigail clamped her legs around Danny's waist, grasped the stick with both hands and swung.

There was a loud pop and the beast went limp. It's wings stilled, the frog-bat dropped out of the sky, leaving the two humans alone in the sky. Abigail screamed "Yeahhhhhh!" into Danny's ear.

Danny winced, both from the deafening scream and the bad breath. He righted himself, found the island they had been heading towards. 'Who knew,' he thought to himself, 'that the worst part of being stranded in the Ghost Zone for a week was the lack of a tooth brush!'

Their joy was short-lived. Just as they got near enough to the floating island to see the roots of trees growing through the rock and hanging in the sky, a wave of unbearable gloom washed over them. Abigail gasped and pointed. A large, black splotch had moved out from behind the island. It was hard to make out its shape because all parts of it were so dark. It roiled and squirmed constantly like it didn't have a body so much as was an absence in space and time.


	3. Chapter 3

Danny continued towards the island, determined to find some way past that abomination and get Abigail back to the mortal realm. As they got nearer the shape of the monster became clearer. It appeared to have no body as such, just a great mass of oily, black tentacles, waving and squirming like a great ball of snakes. On the ends of many, perhaps all, of the tentacles were great, red, blinking eyes, staring at them with unholy lust. "I can see why the other ghosts avoid those things," Danny quipped, "They're butt ugly." But really his heart fell at the sight of the thing.

Danny sped up, trying to get past the withering horror of the Abductor. Abigail tucked her club back in her belt and wrapped her arms around Danny's neck. The thought flashed through his brain that under normal circumstances he'd love to have a pretty girl clinging to him but this was no ordinary moment.

Though he tore through the space between floating islands in the Ghost Zone the distance to the large island that was their goal was too far, the nameless horror in front was them was too near, too fast. It hoved in front of him, blocking their route. Danny veered to the left but the monster had no trouble in staying in front of them.

Abigail was clutching his neck tighter and tighter, whimpering in fear. Danny could feel the overwhelming terror being projected by the Abductor as well. He tried to block it out by concentrating at the task at hand. But every other second it seemed like his heart would stop from the agony he felt. It helped somewhat that he'd been in so many heart-stopping situations in the past. It wasn't that these had left him fearless, but it had taught him how to work while scared out of his wit.

It was hard to judge size or distances in the realm of floating islands. The spaces were so large, and there was nothing to serve as a reference. The monster before him began to loom like some terrestrial thundercloud, a black mass that seems to go up and up and up. Tentacles roiled and twinned around each other. Eyes would unexpectedly open to stare at them, blink close and disappear into the mass of the creature.

"Look out!" Abigail screamed in his ear. She pointed to where a tentacle was unfurling towards them. The mass of black flesh just kept unrolling and unrolling. It moved with a relentless pace. Danny tried to dodge but the limb followed him unerringly. Suddenly he realized that it was only thirty feet away. He could see some kind of slimy ooze dripping off its skin which was otherwise as smooth and shiny as vinyl. An eye opened on the end of the tentacle, blinked at them then the eye itself split open to reveal large and jagged teeth. It lunged at them but Danny fired off a stinging bolt of ectoplasm. The ocular mouth flared then disappeared in a cloud of ash. The body of the tentacle recoiled like a severed bungee cord.

"You did it! You did it!" Abigail screamed. "You stopped the monster."

"Hardly. But it's nice to see that it isn't invincible. Maybe we can get through this yet." Danny dived towards the monster, dodging one questing tentacle and burning another.

"What are you doing?" Abigail screamed. "You can't fight this thing by yourself! You're too close! Pull away!"

"I'm not trying to fight it," Danny called back, "but the farther back we keep from it the easier it is for this Abductor to keep us from getting to the island. We have to get back to the island to get you back to Earth."

"There's got to be a better way."

Well, yes, Danny thought, if I want to give away that Mom and Dad have a working portal. And who's to say that this horror couldn't follow them to the portal and break through. The last thing the Earth needed was a gigantic monster that breathed fear and lived off terror!

Danny dipped under a lunging tentacle then twisted sideways past another. He singed a third that was too close to avoid. Temporarily a void opened up among the thrashing tentacles. He opened up his speed, skimming around the side of the monster.

"We're actually safer here," Danny explained in the calm, "because when the thing has maybe a dozen of its eyes on us, they're all looking at us from different angles because we're so close. I'm betting that it will be so cross-eyed it can't quite place us. Once we get around it we can home in on the island and it will have to place catch-up all the way."

"That's your idea of a plan?" Abigail questioned dubiously.

"I didn't say it was a good plan."

"Incoming!" Abigail screamed.

"Seen it!" Danny answered. "Do me a favor."

"What?"

"Try not to scream in my ear."

"Sorry."

Three tentacles were coming at them in a group. The bulbous tip of one was open, apparently guiding the other two. They tried to form a net to catch Danny but he was too small and agile, slipping past one and bouncing off the other before it could wrap around them. Abigail squealed as they hit the slimy surface of the beast. Danny was too busy watching for the next set of tentacles whipping towards them.

Then he shouted for joy. The island had come into view. His stratagem had worked. He had sailed around the side of the beast too close in for it to stop them. Recklessly Danny threw blasts of ectoplasm all about him, driving questing tentacles back. He pushed himself forward as hard as he could, aiming past the shuddering blot that was an abductor and into the open space beyond.

"Let me know when it's over," Abigail breathed into his ear.

"We're doing good. The island is just over there."

The monster, dwindling in the distance, gave a low reverberating cry. It seemed to turn inside out as it changed direction and followed Danny and Abigail towards the island.

Danny swooped in low and continued rocketing through the branches of the trees growing on the floating island. He dodged this way and that hoping to confuse the abductor to where they were. At the edge of a large clearing in the forest near the middle of the island Danny finally dropped to the ground. He staggered for a moment as the full weight of Abigail pulled on him. He caught his balance and a moment later Abigail slid off his back. Danny stood up and for a moment took a deep breath but suddenly nausea swept over him, along with uncontrollable chills and trembling.

His stomach heaved. Danny rushed around a nearby tree just in time as a gallons of bile exploded from his gut. He bent over panting and heaving in alternating spasms. For a time he thought he was going to vomit his entire insides.

"All you all right?" Abigail asked, coming around the tree to see what he was doing. Danny held up his hand to stop her. "What?" she asked just as another spasm sent him gasping and puking. "Danny? .... Ghostboy? ...Oh..." He could hear her shoes crunching leaves as she walked away. After a time his stomach seemed to have run out of things to void, or maybe had become too tired to spasm any more. He staggered away, found the bole of the tree and slummed to the ground. He was panting, too whipped to even wondered what had happened. Suddenly Abigail was knelling beside, in her hand were some wet leaves. She leaned in and wiped around his mouth with the leaves. The water on the leaves was shockingly cold and the most wonderful thing he had ever experienced. At least at the moment it was.

She threw those away and picked up a second pile of wet leaves. "Here, suck on these. They'll clean out your mouth."

Danny sucked on the leaves as instructed, then spit out the sour wetness. After his third handful of wet leaves his began to feel better, his mouth almost free of the burning sour taste of vomit.

"I didn't know that ghosts could get sick." Abigail said in wonder.

"Never did I," Danny whispered back. He leaned back against the tree and looked at his hands. They were shaking like leaves in a storm. "Oh, God," he sighed and wrapped himself up in a ball.

"What happened?" Abigail asked.

"Delayed reaction, I think," Danny whispered, still too weak to speak normally. "All the time I was flying around that monster I was trying ti ignore that sense of horror it was projecting..."

"I wondered how you were able to do that. I was crying in fear the whole time."

"Once I could stop concentrating on ignoring the fear it all caught up on me at once."

"Makes sense." Abigail said. After a moment she added, "I didn't think you were ever going to stop hurling." She laughed lightly so show she meant well.

Danny was slowly starting to straighten up. From time to time he's shake his head furiously. Soon he had his head tilled back against the tree, eyes closed and breathing heavily but with regular breaths. "I - uh, Fenton mentioned how scary the dreams he had, which turned out to some sort of telepathic communications from you here in the Ghost Zone, were. He wasn't exaggerating. No wonder the denizens of the Ghost Zone avoid these abductors."

Danny lifted his head to look at the girl he had come to rescue. Dirty. Clothes ripped. Her hair a rats-nest. Not covered in vomit....

"How did you keep your sanity all this past week?" he asked. You had that monster hovering around you all that time radiating that sense of endless dread yet you seem pretty chipper and. I've been here maybe an hour or so and I'm heaving my guts out. How did you do it?"

"You didn't see me the first couple nights here."

"There's no night in the Ghost Zone, it's like this all the time."

Abigail held up her right arm. "I've got a watch. I know when it day and night. Anyway, those first days I was crying non-stop. But around the third day I came to a realization. If I wanted to be rescued I was going to have to take charge and make it happen. I found myself thinking 'what would Danny do?' and the one thing I was sure of was that he would not let this monster get the best of him."

Danny looked at her incredulously.

"He's the bravest, fearless, most resourceful person I know," She added.

Danny had never heard himself described like that, except maybe as the opposite of those things. "Danny Fenton?" he echoed.

"Yes, Danny Fenton!" Abigail saw the disbelieve on his face. "I think I know what I'm talking about.. I've worked with him cracking a couple of ghost cases, you know!"

"I think I know Danny a bit better than you. He's nothing like that."

"Oh, your just jealous because.....because...."

Danny didn't want to hurt Abigail's feeling, so he tried to backtrack. "I'm not saying he doesn't try hard to be like that, but you're making him out to be some sort of superhero and he's nothing like that. He's just a kid. I think he sees himself more of a screw-up than not. But, look, what ever gets you through, I guess that's what's important." Danny pushed himself away from the tree and slowly and carefully stood up. "I think we'd better find that rip in the continuum and get you back home before that monster finds us."

"I think it was that way," Abigail pointed and they started off walking in the direction.

After a time she asked, "How did you and Danny hook up? Why do you do all this stuff for him?"

Danny realized that he had never rehearsed a cover story and wasn't sure what to tell the red-headed girl. The truth, of course, was dead out.

"It's complicated," he hedged. Most things were, he thought, so he wasn't lying to her. Abigail just nodded her head, and looked at him to go on.

"He - uh - did me a favor that I can never repay, so I do whatever I can to help him," Danny ad libbed. Inspiration struck him, so he went on, "I feel so indebted to him that I took his name for my own. He's Danny Fenton and I'm Danny Phantom."

"Really? That explains so much. I always wondered why you had such similar names. Sometimes it was kind of confusing because someone would say 'Danny' and I'd wonder who they meant. Uh-huh. So what was your name before you changed it?"

Danny had been listening closely for any sign of disbelieve in Abigail's response and as near as he could tale she believed his story. "That's all in the past," he told her airily. "How did you know you could contact Fenton in his dreams?" he asked, changing the subject.

"It was that night when I asked myself what would Danny do. I remembered I had a picture of him in my wallet and dug it out to look at for inspiration. And then the strangest thing happened. I was looking and looking at it, waiting for inspiration when suddenly it was like I was seeing through the picture and into a large room furnished in a very retro 50's style except for the 90 inch plasma screen TV. I'd never seen a room like that before and was wondering what was going on when I saw Jack Fenton come into the room and ask me 'Did you do your homework?' I was so shocked that Jack Fenton would ask me about my homework that the vision or whatever it was broke up, and I was sitting on the ground back on that horrible island again. After a moment I realized that Fenton hadn't spoken to me personally but to whoever was sitting on the couch on that room."

Danny felt little prickles climbing up his spine hearing Abigail's story because he remembered very well, sitting in the living room the night of his first dream and being asked that very question by his father.

"Danny mentioned that in his first dream he was being chased through a forest, finding space behind a rock to hide out in then touching - ah - I guess that would be your bra." Danny hoped he wasn't blushing as he said this. "Was that something that happened later on?"

"Touching my bra?" Abigail's voice went up a full octave as she repeated his statement as a question.

"Yah. He found it kind of disturbing."

"My bra?"

"It was more than he was dreaming about being a girl. He never saw a face otherwise the idea that he was getting telepathic communications from you from the Ghost Zone would have come sooner." After a moment another thought came to Danny, one that filled him with anxiety. "Did you have any more dreams about being Danny?" he asked.

"What? No. Once I realized that I was somehow able to contact him I put all my effort into telling him where I was."

"So, no weird visions of being in the Boys Room and stuff," Danny prompted.

"No," Abigail said dismissively.

Danny was immensely relieved, fearing that she might have dreamed of him 'Going Ghost,' and figuring out Danny's real secret.

"E-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ck!"

They frozen where they stood as a giant bat-winged frog flapped overhead.

"We must be getting close," Danny whispered.

"What was your first clue," she snapped.

As soon as the creature had flown past them the crept next to the bole of a nearby tree.

"It looks like there's an opening up there," Danny pointed. "Let's see what we can see there."

They moved cautiously from the tree the short distance to the clearing. Freezing whenever another of the bat-frog monstrosities passed over head.

The clearing was a large shallow basin in the island. It looked like a dried up swamp in part, reeds twice as tall as they were covered everywhere, except where trees were crushed to the ground as if something large might have fallen on them , or sat on them some time in the past.

"Over there!" Abigail pointed. "I recognize that tree. It has a massive, squat truck and those two branches coming out like a devil's face or something."

"So it must have brought you through somewhere near there."

"Yeah. I think I ran off that way." She pointed left from the devil's horns tree. "But that monster chased me all over this island before I fell off the edge.

"The Abductor or the Bat Frog?"

"I don't know. I was too afraid to look behind."

Danny nodded as he remembered the dreams they shared. He was trying to figure the quickest way to get across the clearing when Abigail grabbed his shoulder and hoarsely cried, "Danny!"

He looked where she was pointing. Hanging in the sky like a cancerous wound in the heavens was the Abductor. It looked enormous, and close. Several of the bat-frogs were flying around it in circles, swooping down from time to time to skim the island.

"How many of those things does it have," he whispered in despair.

"I see at least four," Abigail answered. "Can't you turn invisible or something so it can't see us cross over to the tree?"

"That only works on Earth. Here ghosts can see anything any other ghost does. It would be nice if we could. Otherwise the only way is to take the long way around the rim and hope we don't get spotted before them.

"Would you look at that." Abigail was pointing towards the monster again. "Look. There! Where you shot it with that energy blast of yours. I swear it's still burning!"

Danny finally could make out the smudge near the monster's equator. It looked like a pinprick of flame against the immense bulk of the creature.

"So?"

"So! It's vulnerable to fire. We've got a weapon against it!"

"Abigail, that tentacle that's on fire was bigger than a tree trunk. It would take a really big fire to seriously hurt something like that."

"Yes-s-s-s! A really big fire." Abigail looked around her with satisfaction.

"Where are we going to get a large fire?"

"You leave that to me. Just give me a half hour then drive that thing back here. Right here where we're standing, OK? I'll take care of everything else.."

Danny looked at her dubiously.

"Oh, like you were never a pyromaniac in your youth?"

Danny continued to look doubtful.

"Oh, just go! Thirty minutes, then bring it back here. Then we'll see who laughs last!"

With a sense of things spinning out of control, Danny looked to the sky, then grabbed the club from Abigail's belt and took to the sky.

***

Danny was glad that he didn't have to fly like Superman, with both arms stretched out in front of him. It allowed him to take a more two-fisted approach to flying. He swerved in close to the nearest Bat-frog, then blinded it with a shot of ectoplasm to its eyes. He knew that the creature was immune to his blasts but he figured the glare from the bolt would blind it for a moment, just enough time for him to pull in closer and swing Abigail's club hard against the side of it's head. There was a satisfying crunch and the creature dropping out of the sky.

The next monster was cagier. It tried to dodge Danny's ectoplasm blast. He got it in one eye, partly blinding it but it was able to see him well enough to avoid his club. The stick bounced off the top of its skull. The third monster twisted out of Danny's way entirely but in doing so opened up the way for Danny to clobber the fourth monster before it even knew Danny was there. Danny turned in the air and headed towards the withering blot in the sky that was the abductor. As he headed towards it his stomach started to knot up as he headed into the miasma projected by the creature. He forced himself to ignore the pain and headed towards the hideous creature.

Danny had decided to center his attack around where the creature was already smoldering. He figured that it would be most sensitive to pain (it's own, that is) there. But as he was crossing the distance to it he saw several of the massive tentacles spin out from the main body and the bulbs at the end opened, not to reveal more eyes, or gnashing teeth but to spit out more of the bat-frog things.

"Rats!" he cursed. He took a moment to find the two things that had survived his initial attack and calculated the best angle to take to get in close to the host body. He wondered what Abigail was planning. What was there that she could do to the abductor that he with all his ghost powers couldn't do? Yet he was sure she had some idea to destroy it. Well, whatever her plan was he still had to survive the flying frog thingies and somehow drive the abductor back to the island.

There now were eight of the bat-frogs flying around him. From time to time one would trying to dive-bomb Danny, lashing out with their electro-shock tongues but because they were so many of them they tended to get in each other's way. Danny blasted those that tried to attack. Most would flinch from his ectoplasmic blast, fearing, he supposed, getting blinded and killed by Danny. They were less of a menace now then earlier.

Danny looked at his wristwatch. The half hour that Abigail had asked for was passed. He darted through the circling bat-frogs and plunged towards the looming blackness of the abductor. The flying servants of the beast followed behind him. Danny directed a long stream of ectrolasm against the monster's side. The tentacles whipped and snapped at him but Danny had stayed far enough away they couldn't reach him. On one or two limbs small fires bloomed. They flared brightly for a moment then died out. Danny wasn't discouraged by that, though the overwhelming sense of doom and failure coming off the beast made it hard not to be. The creature had bellowed in pain. Danny had hurt it. He swung back for another run, sending flaming plasma arcing a long path along the creature many tentacles.

He was turning to flee when a mighty tentacle brushed against him. Danny hastily flung up a shield and spun away from the writhing limb. With a gasp he realized that the monster had already turned towards him. Danny sputtered some flame along the length of the limb trying to grasp him until it burst with a soft pop and shriveled away.

Danny spurted ahead a little bit and waited to make sure that it was following. The horror lumbered after him with the inevitability of a locomotive.

Danny lead it around and under the island until coming up near the large valley he had left the red-headed girl. Danny hoped that whatever plan she had in mind was ready because this was it. It was now or never.

As he was cresting the edge of the island he could see a small fire at the end of the dried up swamp. Abigail was there, wrapping moss around the ends of small sticks, creating torches. Danny guessed what her plan was but couldn't believe it would really work. Still....

Danny pushed himself to fly as fast as he could, circling around the edge of the monster. He drove towards it, firing as much ectoplasm as he could generate at it. Pinpricks of fire broke out on the beast. Nothing that could ever harm the vast creature but just as mosquitos can drive people crazy, so Danny's little pinpricks were driving the Abductor away, forgetting in its panic what was behind it.

The nameless horror crashed into the island with such an impact that the island nearly capsized. It lay caught in the tangle of dead trees in the dried up swamp as the island tried to correct itself. And all the while as the island bucked and rolled Abigail was running around the edge of the swamp throwing her torches into the dry grasses there.

The grasses caught fired with an explosive "whooof" and spread rapidly towards the middle, burning right under the struggling monster. And as the fire spread past, the oily secretions on the monster's tentacles burst into flame. The monster gave forth a bellow as pain so loud it rattled the leaves of the still healthy trees outside the crater. Tentacle roiled over tentacle. The monster tried to heave itself out of the trap it was in but flames were everywhere.

Danny sailed in, hovering near the edge of the dried swamp and whenever it looked like the monster might actually escape, racked its topside with ectoplasmic fire, driving it back. It was a little nauseous watching the monster die. Danny never tried to killed the ghosts that had attacked him before. It had never been a 'kill or be killed' situation before and it disturbed him that he was enjoying the monster's suffering. He know what he was doing was the right thing to do. The monster had, after all abducted Abigail for no reason but to terrify her for weeks on end until she died from fear. It had no redeeming qualified. And yet just killing it left Danny feeling unclean in a way that he would never entirely scrub away.

After a time the fire started burning out, and it did so it revealed charred mounds of flesh that gave off an unholy stink.

Abigail had stepped back from the edge of the depression and watched the fire from there. Convinced that the monster would never try to escape, Danny flew down to land beside her.

"Wasn't that great!" she exulted.

"I've got to admit I didn't think it would work. I'm glad you didn't tell me what your plan was in advance."

"Has Danny Fenton done anything like this?"

"I don't think it's a competition."

Something in his voice made Abigail turn and look at him. "You're upset because I killed one of your fellow ghosts aren't you?"

"Not my fellow ghost. I just.....I don't ..... Let's find that rip in the dimensions and get you home before anything else happens, OK?"

"Yeah, sure. I'll be glad to have a shower." They started circling the burning swamp towards the tree that looked like a devil. "We had to do it," she said after a moment. "That was no other way."

"I know." Danny answered, then added. "I don't have to like it, but I know it had to be done."

They were soon at the tree. They walked around it for a bit looking for the rift but couldn't find it. Then Danny remembered that Abigail had said she had run past this oddly shaped tree and not that she had arrived near it. Back-tracking they finally found it on a small rise near the edge of the island. The tear in the dimensions was maybe two feet long and six inches wide. Through it they could see into a lab filled with an assortment of benches, instruments and so on. Some of the machines reminded Danny of things in his parent's laboratory so he was pretty sure this was the research room in the Guys in White Headquarters that Abigail had mentioned. Danny stuck his arms through the rip and felt around. He was able to penetrate it without any resistence. The rip felt maybe a foot deep with firm walls, sort of like the walls of the portal in his parent's basement. The only problem was that it was way too narrow to Abigail to get through.

Danny wedged his shoulder against one side of the crack and pressed on the other side with his hands. He could felt the rift giving a little. He tried imagining it hot and soft like wax and could feel energy rippling down his arms and into the edges of the rift.

He let it go and stood up. "We can do this," he told the red-headed girl. "I'll push this hole rounded and then you wiggle through. When you get on the other side you should be home free. But when you tell them what happened to you, leave me out of it, OK? And leave Fenton out of it."

"Why?"

"It just raises too many questions. And if you say Fenton was involved in any way with your rescue, they'll never let him go. You escaped from the monster, you killed it and you found this rift and crawled through. And no one was anywhere near to help you. Stick to that story. No one will be entirely happy about it but they won't be able to disprove it either. OK?"

"Yeah, you're right." Unexpectedly, Abigail leaned over and pressed her lips to his cheek. "Thanks for everything."

"I thought you wanted to grown up to break ghosts?" Danny said.

"I'll make an exception for you," she laughed. She bent over and poked her arms through the rift. That was as far as she got.

Danny got in position and pushed against the edges of the rift. It slowly widened. Abigail's head disappeared through the rift and then her shoulders. She wiggled furiously to get her chest and stomach through. Her legs hung in the air now kicking furiously as they tried, without anything to push again, to propel her through the hope.

"I can't move!" Danny heard her shout dimly through the rift.

He looked to see what the problem was. Her pants were caught against the edge of the rift. They had pulled down partially until the flare of her hips prevented any further movement.

"Your butts too big," he called back.

"What? It is not!" Abigail shouted back and wiggled furiously to get through.

"Hold on," Dany told her, and, letting go of the side of the rift for a moment, grabbed her legs and rotated her body so that instead of going through the rift on her stomach she was going through on her side. He yanked up her shorts, making sure that the belt on them was inside the rift, then heaved forward as hard as he could. There was a moment of resistence then all of a sudden she popped through, disappearing so fast that Danny half fell through with her. The instant her feet went through the rift it began to close. Danny struggled to get out of the rift before it closed completely, pulling his one arm out of a hole so small he was sure he would be trapped there with it between dimensions for ever. But finally it slip free and the rift disappeared.

Danny stood there, with his hands on his knees breathing heavily for a few moments, then straightened up. While he couldn't see any sign of the rift now he imagined that it was still there, a microscopic hole created by the Ghost Zone Radio of Beaucoup Bucks. Unless another Abductor came this way Danny supposed the world would be safe enough. And who knew perhaps following Abigail's story they'd turn off the Radio and leave it off.

Danny looked around the floating island to see if there was any unfinished business. The swamp still smoldered over the charred remains of the horror that had crawled out of the uncharted depths of the ghost zone. It wouldn't be bothering anyone ever again. The frog-things flew in aimless circles around the island. Without the abductor to guide them Danny didn't think they would present a problem to the ghosts in this part of the Ghost Zone.

Danny flew unmolested through them, oriented himself and started the long journey back to the Fenton Portal.

He activated it from the Ghost Zone and slipped through into the familiar and reassuring safety of his parent's laboratory. Danny was surprised to find, sitting in a chair pulled to face the portal, his sister, Jazz, sleeping, with what looked like a tennis racket held in her arms. It was actually a Fenton Basher, a device that carried a paralyzing ectoplasmic charge across its wire strings.

He settled on the ground and changed back to his mortal self. "Jazz?" he called softly, then a little louder when she didn't wake up. She was out of her chair in an instant, wrapping him in a big hug. "We were so worried about you!" she cried in his ear.

"How's Mom and Dad?"

"Oh, well, the FBI took them in for questioning last night around six. Mom called around midnight to say they'd be there a bit longer because Dad was getting agitated."

Jack Fenton getting agitated was not a sight for innocent children. "I didn't mean for any of this to happen," Danny muttered.

"What did happen? I found your note on my desk last night and decided to wait down here for you to come back...."

Danny pointed to the Fenton Basher, "Was that for me?" he asked.

"Let's just say I was very tempted at first."

Danny explained as quickly as he could. "Now that Abigail's back," he concluded, "I think the best thing is for me to turn myself in. Once the FBI hears that Abby's back they won't be interested in us." Danny walked over to one of his Dad's workbenches and rummaged in a drawer until he found a pen and some paper . He wrote a couple short notes and eft them in the bench, then he changed back to Danny Phantom and tucked the notes into a pocket of his jumpsuit. "I want to let Sam and Tucker know I'm OK before I go to the police because I figure I'll be there a while. I don't want to use my cellphone in case the FBI is still monitoring it. So I'll leave them these notes. He looked at his watch. "6 AM., they'll still be sleeping. See you later, Jazz." And was gone before she could say anything.

He found Tucker's house a few blocks away and phased through the wall into Tucker's bedroom. It was small and cluttered with an abundance of electronic gadgetry, both assembled and disassembled. Tucker was sprawled on his bed, his red beret laying on the sidetable next to his alarm clock. Danny dropped his note into Tucker's hat, knowing that Tucker would put it on before getting out of bed, and thus find his note. He slipped back through the walls of the house and flew off to Sam house.

Sam lived in a smallish mansion in a block of elaborate townhouses. He wasn't sure where her bedroom was. it wasn't a part of the house he'd ever been invited to. He drifted from room to room until he found hers. The black wallpaper was a clue.

But Sam wasn't in her bed or in the room. Danny was trying to think of what to do when the bathroom door opened with a cloud of hot air. Sam Manson, wrapped in a towel, stopped with a squeak at the sight of Danny. Danny, blushed full red and spun around.

"What are you doing here?" San demanded, clutching at her towel.

"I brought you a note," Danny said, holding the letter out, behind his back to her. "I wanted to let you know I was OK, before I turned myself into the police"

"But why sneak into my bedroom?"

"I thought you would be sleeping."

"I haven't been able to sleep since you disappeared."

There was a rustle behind Danny's back. "You can turn around now, Danny I've got a robe on."

Danny did, to find her wearing a vast hooded cape like something out of the 18th century. It was very gothic, Danny noted.

"So what's going on?" Sam asked,

"It's a long story. But the short version's in this note. Abigail's home. I was not involved. Everything's OK. I'm turning myself into the police and I doubt that they'll hold me long once they hear that Abigail is OK."

"Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde? What's she doing in all this? No, don't answer. 'All will be revealed later' I suppose," Sam spoke in mocking tone.

"I swear, I'll tell you and Tucker everything as soon as the FBI lets me go."

"What did I tell you about hanging out with that--" but Danny was already gone.

Sam shook her head. "I hope he's got a good lawyer...."

***

The police station looked like it had last been decorated sometime in the mid-70s. Dilapidated folding chairs lined the edges of a lobby done up in linoleum and panel board. A well beaten counter separated the lobby from the policeman behind it sitting at a computer. Feeling every bit as nervous and uncertain as he ever had in his life, Danny approached the counter. "Excuse me, sir," he said. "My name is Daniel Fenton. I believe you're looking for me."

Epilogue

It was about three weeks later that Danny got a call on his cellphone. "They make you a free man yet," the voice asked.

"I could ask you the same question."

Abigail sighed. "They're going to let me go back to school next week. They kept me in the hospital for a week - - 'for observation.' I didn't need observation I just needed a big tub of hot water to soak in. Then the Guys in White spent a week hooking me up to every imaginable machine in the lab. If it were up to my so-called father I'd still be hooked up to those damned machines. So what happened to you"

Danny sighed. "I went to a police station, turned myself in. They put me in a small room by myself for half an hour. I guess it was one of their interrogation rooms. I looked for blood but couldn't find any. Heh heh." Danny sighed when Abigail failed to join in the laughter.

He continued: "Then the FBI came and took me to their offices, put me in another small room and started barking questions at me non-stop. I don't even think they even stopped to listen to my answers. This must have been going on for an hours before my parent's lawyer found me and put a stop to that. I guess my sister called to let him know I was turning myself in.

"They kept questioning me for another hour before till finally someone came in with a note. They all looked at it, passed it, went off into the corner to talk things over then continued questioning me as if nothing happened. I'm pretty sure the note said that you'd been found but they weren't ready to give up on me. Another hour of that and I was about dead on my feet. Mr. Samuels, our lawyer, called it a night. Told them any more questioning would amount to torture. They put me in an empty cell then about four hours later let me go.

"They didn't apologize for anything."

Danny sighed again. "How about you? Are you on triple-secret permanent lock-down?"

"I'm always on triple-secret lock-down. Daddy's little girl isn't allowed to scrap her knees. I fell on my face when your friend pushed me through the portal. Split my lip and got a bloody nose. After everything I'd been through I think I got hurt worse at home then over there.

"The scientists working on the lab heard me fall. Recognized me, of course, and called my dad. Half the building must have trooped into the lab to see me. They rushed me to a hospital, all the while pelting me with questions. I told them about being pulled through the rip in space by the Abductor monster, then that I'd run around for a week trying to avoid it before finding the rift again and climbing back through it. I didn't say anything about your friend or about how we destroyed it. He wanted to be left out of it, so I did."

"Did they ask you a lot of questions about the Ghost Zone?" Danny asked.

"I didn't think they'd ever stop." Abigail sighed. "I'm running for my life and they wanted to know what kinds of trees were there. What kinds of flowers I saw. Insects, birds, what have you. What the gravity was like, the air. I felt like a freaking astronaut come back from the Moon!"

"In a way you are. The first person to enter and return from the Ghost Zone."

"Danny, you and I both know that's not true. But since you want people to think I was I'll let it go. I suppose it's part of keeping your friend secret."

"You're not going to hunt him when you become a Guy in White. Or is it Girl? Will you be a Girl in White or a Guy?"

"Guys In White. They have some woman operatives already."

"My friend?"

"If he breaks the law...."

"How can you say that!" Danny objected.

"Would you protect him if he started breaking the laws?"

"He would never do that."

"But if he did?"

"He won't!"

Neither spoke for a moment, lest temper fly any further.

"Well," Abigail began. "I just wanted to find out how you were doing."

"I'm fine."

"I'm glad. And you can tell your friend, I owe him. OK? I owe him big time."


End file.
